PROTECTED BY THE ALIEN WARMACHINE

  AN ALIEN WARRIOR ROMANCE

  MY MONSTER, MY PROTECTOR.

  LESLIE CHASE

  Protected by the Alien Warmachine

  Copyright 2024 Leslie Chase

  All rights reserved

  Cover Designed by Miblart.com

  This is a work of fiction intended for mature audiences. All names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Created with Vellum

  CONTENTS

  1. Talia

  2. Kal’va

  3. Talia

  4. Kal’va

  5. Talia

  6. Kal’va

  7. Talia

  8. Kal’va

  9. Talia

  10. Kal’va

  11. Talia

  12. Kal’va

  13. Talia

  14. Kal’va

  15. Talia

  16. Epilogue

  My Monster, My Protector

  The Crashland Chronicles

  Sci Fi Romance by Leslie Chase

  About Leslie Chase

  1

  TALIA

  “This place,” I announced with satisfaction, “is cursed.”

  Beside me, Juliette rolled her eyes.

  “You can’t just call everything ‘cursed,’” she said. “That’s not a useful category.”

  I grinned and gestured around us with my flashlight. The stone walls, black as the darkness of space, cracked with age and long-ago violence, drank in the light. Against that, the inky darkness of the hole in the floor barely stood out. Another step and I’d have tumbled down, breaking a limb if I didn’t break my neck. Juliette’s keen eyes and fast reactions saved me, again.

  “Looks pretty cursed to me,” I told her. “Which fits the legends.”

  I should know. I’d found this place by following folk tales and records stretching back into galactic history, stories about a place from which no one returned. The ruins of a civilization that fell before humans got the hang of sharpening sticks.

  Which was exactly what we needed to save the planet.

  Tulla II wasn’t a true dead world, not yet, though it got closer by the day. The wind, arid and hot, blew across a continent-sized desert. No plant life survived anywhere within a hundred miles. No animal life remained at all, making it a perfect candidate for terraforming.

  Three years ago, Taverner Terraforming bought the rights to reawaken the planet and replace its existing ecosystem with our own. In a few decades, what remained of the native ecology would be gone, taking Tulla’s rich history with it.

  “I suppose Taverner’s board will see it as a curse,” Juliette conceded. “The Republics won’t let them wreck the planet, not with a find on this scale. No one takes a risk with Ancient tech. They might brush a few minor finds aside, but this is a fucking jackpot.”

  She was trying to convince herself as much as me, but everyone knew big corporations like Taverner got away with a lot. As seriously as the United Republics took the laws around Ancient tech, I didn’t want to rely on their objectivity.

  Fixing a rope ladder to the flagstones of the corridor, I threw the rest over the edge. It hit stone a level below, clattering, and I paused, looking down into the dark.

  “Should we report this first?” Juliette asked. I didn’t need to look, I heard the grin in her voice as she threw down the gauntlet. “We’re supposed to wait for permission before we risk disturbing anything else.”

  “The point of this is to save Tulla from being landscaped into one more McPlanet,” I said. “The more we document, the better our odds, right? If we let him, Waterman’ll keep us sitting on our hands until the terraforming engines fire up. Our report won’t have reached Earth yet, the reply’s at least a week away.”

  Before she could argue, I swung myself down onto the ladder and yelped. The edge of the hole was deceptively sharp, biting through my glove and into the palm of my right hand. I hissed in pain and tried to ignore it as I climbed down the ladder. My curiosity had gotten me worse wounds than that, and I wasn’t about to concede defeat yet.

  As soon as I reached the bottom and looked around, I forgot all about my injury. The room was vast, and better preserved than the rest of the complex. Strange, repeating patterns covered the walls. Writing, I realized, as my eyes caught a few symbols I recognized. Those were in some of the oldest languages I’d heard of, and barely understood, but I thought I saw the word for ‘danger’ in several.

  One wall, opposite the rope ladder, was different. No writing here, just a giant set of doors, and in front of them, a dead alien. And what an alien it was. He was, because the figure was naked and most definitely male. I blushed, looking away from the evidence.

  Recording everything, I studied him. Blue skin gleamed under my flashlight, and I did my best to take an objective look. Humanoid, muscular, and big. Powerful muscles beneath strangely textured skin that called out to be touched. Crystals emerged from his skin on his arms and shoulders, spikes growing out of him almost organically. They gave him a dangerous air, not that he needed any help to look menacing, not with his size and build. Standing, he’d be seven feet tall at least.

  He looked alive, aside from his stillness. There was neither breathing or a pulse, but no sign of death, either. No wounds, no sign of illness or anything else to explain his death, but he’d been lying here for at least ten thousand years. Even the Ancients couldn’t build stasis fields that would keep someone alive this long. Probably.

  Biting my lip, I pulled off a glove and reached out with one hesitant finger to touch his bare skin. Stupid? Yeah. Something about him drew me in, though, and my curiosity wouldn’t let go.

  His skin felt warm, dry, and oddly smooth, a fascinating texture. Nothing like a human but delightful, and not dead. I had no rational reason for it, but as soon as I touched him, I knew that this alien, this Ancient, still lived.

  Glancing down along his motionless body, I bit my lip as my gaze neared his cock. Everything alien had to go in the catalog, including alien dick. That’s the lie I told myself. Science be damned, I’d have taken a look no matter what.

  What I saw shocked me and made my cheeks burn. He was massive, even in proportion to his build, and crystal nodes emerged from his dick in a pattern that looked purposeful. I couldn’t help wondering what they’d feel like, but whether he was dead or sleeping, I wasn’t about to touch an alien dick to find out.

  No. Definitely not.

  “Hey, Talia.” The shout echoed through the room, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. “What are you doing to that poor alien?”

  I’d completely forgotten Jules was with me. My face heated and I jerked my hand back, glad that my body blocked her view of where I’d been reaching. My eyes widened as I looked down at the smear of blood I’d left on the aliens’ chest. What’s wrong with me? How did I forget I’m bleeding?

  I’ve been called a daredevil, been told my risk assessments are laughable. That’s more than fair, but I’ve never been so distracted by a find to bleed on it before.

  Thank god, Jules wasn’t paying that much attention to me. Her focus was on her scanner, and she pointed it past me toward the great doors. Glad that she didn’t see my blush, I turned to look at what had captured her attention.

  Set into the doors were four large earthenware jars. I’d missed them in the gloom and with the alien to look at, but now they pulsed with an inner light, they couldn’t be more obvious.

  They could contain anything. Antimatter, hostile nanoswarms, mind-controlling insects? All were possible in Ancient sites, and careless xenoarchaeologists risked more lives than their own. I backed up hurriedly, bumping into Jules.

  “Is that…are those hyperwaves?” she shook her scanner as though that would make the readings make sense. It didn’t help. “Okay. Fine. He’s connected to whatever’s in those jars through hyperspace. That totally makes sense. Yep.”

  I looked over her shoulder. What she said was crazy, but it wasn’t wrong. Somehow, the alien was generating hyperspace channels to the four containers. That ought to be impossible, even the smallest generator was six foot long. The alien was big, but not that big.

  Warily walking forward toward him, I tried to understand. I’d hardly taken a step when I stopped with a shrill yelp.

  Jules was beside me at once, a small pistol appearing in her hand as if by magic as she looked around for the threat. “What? What is it?”

  My finger shook as I pointed at the ‘dead’ alien resting on the stone, and my mouth wouldn’t work right. I’m not sure I said anything in any intelligible language, but Jules swore and swung the pistol around to cover him.

  His fingers twitched again. No longer as still as the stone slab beneath him, tremors ran through him, muscles coming back to life after thousands of years. Jules kept her weapon pointed at him, though I wasn’t sure that tiny weapon even qualified as a threat to the massive warrior.

  “Tell the others,” I hissed at her. “Go, they need to hear about this.”

  “Yeah, so we’ll tell them all about it.” Juliette’s voice hardened to a growl. “I’ll cover him. You get up the ladder and I’ll follow.”

  “Fuck off, you know how slow I am at climbing. One of us should stay and document this, right? You’re the athletic one, you go first.”

  The alien’s hand lifted from its place on the bier, trembled, and dropped back down. Juliette swore under her breath, then scrambled up the rope to the tunnel above, taking a quarter of the time I’d need. I kept my eye on the alien, my heart pounding as his chest rose and fell, his already powerful body hardening, muscles flexing as he stirred. Lying motionless, he’d looked like the sexiest man I’d ever seen.

  Moving, he was fast becoming the sexiest god I could imagine.

  “Hey! Talia! Don’t stand there drooling over your Ancient boyfriend, get your ass up here before he skins you alive.” Jules never was one to pull her punches, verbal or otherwise. I moved back to the foot of the rope ladder but shook my head.

  “No way I’d get up there before he catches me. I’m going to watch and take notes.”

  “Fucking idiot academics,” Jules snarled, as though she wasn’t a xenoarchaeologist post-grad, same as me. “Fine, I’ll cover you from up here.”

  “No, you get to safety. We can’t both stay here and risk our lives, or no one will know what happened to us.”

  Somehow, Jules’s silence was more profane than any amount of cursing could have been, but she went. A scramble of feet on stone, running footsteps, and she was gone. I was alone.

  Alone, apart from the blue-skinned mountain of muscle and crystal rising from his bier.

  I hope I haven’t made a terrible mistake.

  2

  KAL’VA

  Ido not know how long I rested in the embrace of death, consciousness hovering on the brink of Darkness Eternal, that final ending to which I’d consigned so many. In that dreamlike state, time passed without me registering it. My body lay still on its bier, dead but waiting. My mind dreamed in the walls of my tomb, stored by the cunning arts of the Makers.

  I’d woken five times since the Makers placed me in this crypt, and each time I’d destroyed those who came to plunder the inner sanctums of their tomb. This was the sixth. A pulse of vital energy reached me, a living being touching me and calling me from my sleep-death. An unfamiliar being, an intruder. The creature was not from this world, nor from any species in the Makers’ database, and the tomb required a guardian’s services.

  I should have woken earlier, when they entered the tomb. That they had reached my crypt without triggering the tomb’s defenses was worrying.

  Status reports edged into my consciousness, knowledge pouring into my mind. None of the news brought me joy. Large sections of the tomb complex reported damage, and most of the rest were dark, reporting nothing at all. The auto-repair systems failed, as did the comms and most of the storage.

  I should receive updates from the entire tomb, but I only had full access to my crypt. A few alerts trickled through the system to me, far fewer than expected. They spoke of unexpected air movements, breaches of the outer walls, changes in the atmosphere. Old damage, not the fault of the current intruders. Whoever caused it, they were long gone or long dead.

  A warm hand on my shoulder brought my focus back into the chamber. I didn’t react to the intruder’s touch. I couldn’t. My body lay dead, drained of all vitality, and the resurrection protocol took time.

  Some of my senses had returned. Sight would come last, but touch gave me valuable information about the creature. A warm-blooded species with an internal skeleton. No different to me, in that regard. Oxygen breathing. Inquisitive. Pleasant.

  Wait. Pleasant? That wasn’t a word which should appear in my analysis. Nor was it strong enough. Delightful? Wonderful? Amazing? None fit. Perhaps it has been too long since I felt touch, I thought. I might not know how long I’d lain here, but it was clearly far longer than I’d ever been dead before.

  Vibrations in the air startled the intruder, and my hearing had returned enough to make out a voice. Radio waves mirrored the sound, and my systems had no difficulty decoding the primitive encryption. It wouldn’t help me understand the unknown language they spoke, yet, but it was a start.

  For one thing, it let me count the intruders. A dozen of them, most remaining outside in the grounds of the tomb complex. Two had entered the upper levels, one stood beside me, and one in the corridor above my crypt. Signals flickered between the upper three, and I learned what I could from them. Most of the transmissions were pure data shared between their primitive computers, which I left for the tomb to analyze. My attention was on the voice channels.

  The upper two had deep voices, their signals bounced through the tomb to connect them with the softer, sweeter voice. A female voice, I guessed—her signal was easier to match to the radio transmissions, because her words reached my ears.

  Which meant there was a hole from the corridor into my crypt. If I could have snarled at the self-repair mechanisms, I would have, but my lungs had not yet re-inflated.

  A fourth voice interrupted, stopping my thoughts in their tracks. It came from the creature at my side, and commanded my attention far more than the others, leaving me transfixed. Warm, calm strength wrapped in smoky resonance, it hit me hard, far harder than it should have. I would listen to her until the stars burned out, given the chance.

  That voice came from the intruder standing beside me in my crypt, and as soon as I heard her voice, I knew with a fiery certainty that she would be mine.

  3

  TALIA

  Alive, he was even more impressive than dead. Despite his massive, muscular frame, he moved with the lethal grace of a tiger, and I was acutely aware that I’d intruded on his territory. Eyes blazing with golden light fixed on me, weighing and measuring. My cheeks burned as he gave me a quick once over, then a slower, more careful up-and-down. It was like he looked into my soul as well as at my body.

  He obviously liked what he saw. Between his legs, his cock stiffened and pulsed, crystal nodes glittering along its impressive length. The sight made me swallow nervously, and I realized I was biting my lip.

  He stalked closer, each movement a step in a dance, alluring, exciting, intriguing. Transfixed, I watched, caught in his gaze like prey in a predator’s trap.

  No, fuck this. I refuse to be a passive observer here.

  “H’hedrahn yos?” My pronunciation of Old Galactic was based purely on theory. The language was thousands of years dead. Despite that, it was the only language we might have in common, so I did my best. If I got it right, I’d asked ‘who are you’ in a formal but friendly manner, but I couldn’t rule out that I’d told him his spaceship was full of eels.

  He stopped, cocked his head to the side, and smiled. His reply came too fast to follow, sounding nothing like the Old Galactic I’d studied.

  My confusion must have been obvious, because he slowed down and tried again, slow and clear, pointing to himself. “Kal’va.”

  Was that his title? Description? Name? Hard to say. In Old Galactic, the va ending meant ‘of war’ and Kal I didn’t recognize. I played it safe. Putting a hand on my chest, I said, “Talia.”

  “Tal’ia.” His voice was deep, echoing, powerful, a sound I felt more than I heard. Spoken like that, my name sent a shiver down my spine, and blood rushed to my cheeks.

  I could listen to him for hours, I thought. He’s said two words to me, and I’m melting.

  A more appropriate emotion would be fear, even existential terror. Entire colonies had died because someone activated the wrong bit of Ancient tech, and here was Kal’va, alive, moving, and dangerous. It could be the end of everything I’d known.

  Instead, my body tingled with a much more pleasant emotion as he advanced on me. What would his touch feel like? His skin, his crystals? I tried to tell myself it was curiosity alone burning in my heart, but that wasn’t all.

  My back hit the wall, leaving me nowhere to go, and he loomed over me. Intimidating? Yes. Hell yes. The only thing scarier than the immortal alien standing over me was how much I wanted, needed, him.

  All the evidence that he shared my desires was there, plain as day, in the magnificent and terrifying shaft of blue flesh and luminous stone standing proud between his legs. I shuddered at the idea of that monster inside me, though I couldn’t say whether I shook with desire or fear.

 

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